Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 345

A Sequence of Notes That Drift

Marco Lucchi’s “Angel” is a synthesized slice of the ethereal. It is less a song than it is a sequence of notes that drift, occasionally hanging in midair before another sequence arrives. Sometimes that subsequent sequence emerges from a held note. Other times it occurs more suddenly, like a swift wind brought it into place. The instrumentation is broadly defined as synthesizer and mellotron. The effect is that of a distant organ and a tight string section.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/marcolucchi. More from Lucchi, who is based in Modena, Italy, at musichevirtuali.org and marcolucchi.bandcamp.com.

A Broker Tour of Clint Mansell’s High-Rise Score

“The night passed noisily, with constant movement through the corridors, the sounds of shouts and breaking glass in the elevator shafts, the blare of music falling across the dark air.”
—J.G. Ballard’s High Rise

Among the many promising aspects of the forthcoming wide-screen adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s classic novel High-Rise is that it’s set as a period piece. The film unfolds in the fabulous, wide-collar, garishly colored 1970s, the same era during which the book, a 1975 publication, was released. That is unlike recent filmed versions of, say, Planet of the Apes, or The Fantastic Four, or Jason Statham’s take on one of Richard Stark’s Parker novels, just to list a few examples, all of which original works were endemic to the era in which they were produced, and then yanked into the future when filmed.

With the new High-Rise, there’s no adjusting to today’s surveillance-media reality, no evocation of how 9/11 rewired America’s brain, no consumer-grade Internet, and no smartphones — all of which could easily lend themselves to Ballard’s urban fable of consumer convenience. The book is a characteristically harrowing Ballardian story in which the violence that humans do to each other, this time in a concrete and steel vertical manifestation of class differences, somehow manages to mask an even darker and deeper potential for violence. The more we play dress up, the more the animal in us, the animal that we are, comes alive.

Clint Mansell (Black Swan, Stoker, Requiem for a Dream) has provided the score to the adaptation, directed by Ben Wheatley and starring Tom Hiddleston, and judging by the first public track, “Cine-Camera Cinema,” it may be a willfully anachronistic act of underscoring — or maybe not. (One of the characters, played here by Luke Evans, is a documentary filmmaker, and “cine-camera” is the term in the novel for his equipment.) The piece is deeply subdued, chanting heard behind an enticing scrim of undulating drones. It has none of the symphonic grandeur of 1970s movie scores, nor the swagger of rock music at the time, though what sound like whistling does bring to mind Ennio Morricone’s westerns. Then again, the post of the track on SoundCloud quotes the Hollywood Reporter’s description: “a lustrous retro-classical score.” So, perhaps the music will be as era-specific as Tom Hiddleston’s lapel. Either way, this excellent first taste of Mansell’s work sets expectations high.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/silvascreen.

Synth City, Part 2 of 2

Sync 01 is the name of an event, due to be held at Codeword in San Francisco on March 5, celebrating modular synthesizers, with an emphasis on the Eurorack format. The featured manufacturers will include Audio Damage, WMD, Dave Smith Instruments, Rossum Electro-Music, Roger Linn, Makenoise, Toppobrillo, Mordax, Industrial Music Electronics (formerly The Harvestman), Blue Lantern, Noise Engineering, 4MS, Synthrotek, and Percussa. Featured retailers include Robotspeak and I/O Music Technology. And there will be four performers: Rodent, Bana Haffar, James Cigler, and Tyler Thompson. Sync 01 was organized by Audio Damage’s Chris Randall, whom I interviewed via email for an article at 48hills.org. Below is the full transcript, lightly edited, of the interview:

Marc Weidenbaum: How did Sync 01 come together?

Chris Randall: I was thinking about having an Audio Damage clinic at one of our retail partners in the Bay Area, since your city is one of the main loci of experimental music (and thus our customer base). The opportunity presented itself, through the good graces of the owner of Codeword / DNA, to have an event with a somewhat larger scope, and it just kind of fell in to place. All of the boutique synth manufacturers in the Western US are fairly friendly with one another, and these sorts of events are a very good promotional opportunity for us, so it’s not a complicated thing to put together.

It’s worth noting that, as experimental and boutique synth makers, we don’t really have anywhere to advertise, and our products aren’t in every Guitar Center in the country. These sorts of events are how we connect with the users, so we’re always looking for ways to make them happen.

Weidenbaum: It’s Sync 01. Is Sync 02 also going to be in San Francisco, or are you taking this medicine show on the road?

Randall: We’ll see how the first one plays out. My intention is to make it a going concern, but I haven’t really sat down and thought about the potential scope of it yet. The Midwest has a very large boutique synth show every year in the fall, and I think there’s a need for one on the West Coast as well. At the risk of sounding remarkably self-absorbed, I simply can’t bring myself to actually pay money to go to Schaumburg, Illinois. I’d very much rather spend my time in San Francisco, since it’s much closer and isn’t Schaumburg, Illinois. As to whether I could justify doing it elsewhere, well, that remains to be seen.

Weidenbaum: That’s pretty great to have Roger Linn and Dave Smith Instruments involved. Were there any San Francisco Bay Area must-haves you didn’t manage to convince to participate?

Randall: I wanted to get Dave Rossum to come, of course, and I was very pleased when he decided to attend. While he’s obviously part of the pantheon of great synth builders, he’s new to our little Eurorack market, and it’s great that he’s involved and engaged. So Roger and the two Daves were at the top of my wish list. I actually had to turn away a couple small manufacturers, which really pained me, but this quickly grew to fill the available space, and I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew.

Weidenbaum: For an unfamiliar audience, could you characterize some of the smaller firms who will be participating?

Randall: Well, I think the over-riding commonality among the companies participating is that, with the obvious exception of Dave Smith Instruments, they’re all one- and two-man shops. That’s par for the course in boutique musical instrument companies. My point being that “smaller” is a hazy term. I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of instruments out in the world with Roger Linn’s name on them, but he doesn’t have any more employees than Audio Damage does. Ditto for Dave Rossum.

Weidenbaum: Could you talk a bit about the first modules you developed, and how it used different parts of your brain than software or composing or performing had previously?

Randall: While my business partner Adam Schabtach (who is the coding half of the company) tried to warn me about the pains of hardware development, I didn’t internalize it. The designs themselves were actually fairly easy, since we initially decided on a platform, then figured out what code we could shove in it from our existing stockpile. What I wasn’t prepared for, at all, was how long everything takes. I was used to having an idea for a plug-in on Monday, and having a more-or-less working prototype, or at least a functional design, on Friday. This is the same, except add three months. So my desire for immediacy, which is easy to satisfy in music-making, and relatively easy in plug-in making, was soundly thrashed when it came to hardware.

We now have a beautiful and (for hardware) extremely fast prototyping system in place with the help of William Mathewson of WMD, and our digital platforms are designed by Eric Brombaugh to allow that rapid prototyping, so we’re nearly back to plug-in speed. At least for the prototypes. When it comes to actually shipping a product, add three months. Still.

Weidenbaum: Did you have significant hardware-design experience before making your early Audio Damage modules?

Randall: None at all. Adam had built a huge modular synth, and is quite handy with electronics. My hardware knowledge largely consists of knowing that you shouldn’t pick up the hot end of a soldering iron, and I didn’t have the vaguest notion of the logistics of manufacturing. So much of this has been on-the-job training for me. But then again, I’d never touched 3D Studio Max or written a line of code before I started designing products and user interfaces, and I didn’t have a single minute of musical training before I decided to be a performing musician, and I did okay at those things. I’m a quick study, and the one thing common to all of these careers I’ve had is that they revolve around my main skill set: working through a problem to its obvious solution, not being afraid to ask for help, and having an intense desire to reach that solution. The only thing that changes is the definition of “problem.” Whether it’s putting together an event like Sync 01, recording an album, shipping a piece of software, or shipping a piece of hardware, the process is always the same: get the right people together working on the same goal, and if that goal is worthy, the solution will present itself.

Weidenbaum: Just for a broader sense of your musical experience here, are there clubs — existing or long gone — you use to play at here that you have formative memories from?

Randall: We played the Trocadero a few times; I don’t recall if Sister Machine Gun ever headlined there or not; I feel like we did, but I can’t be certain. There was a venue in Palo Alto called The Edge where I have some really great memories. It was a large Quonset hut, wasn’t it? I fell off the front of the stage there once while playing guitar. Landed on my feet and didn’t miss a note. However, DNA Lounge is, and has always been, the best venue in San Francisco.

Weidenbaum: My favorite Audio Damage plugin is Automaton. Any chance that’ll be a module someday?

Randall: While it seems like a fairly simple plug-in, translating it to hardware would be a real bear. There’s a lot going on under the hood that would be difficult to do in an embedded context. However, rest assured that it’s on my wish list. When I bring it up, Adam gives me the side-eye, but I’ll get my way.

Weidenbaum: Is there a house rule, an overarching approach, that you could use to describe Audio Damage’s approach to modules?

Randall: First and foremost, a potential product has to be something either Adam or I (or ideally both of us) wants to use. We very rarely (never?) do something just so it will generate income. This is probably not the wisest business practice, but it works for us. When one of us has an idea, he has to be able to make a convincing case to the other that it is a viable expenditure of resources, and at the end of the process, it’ll be something that one or both of us needs to make our own music.

The other main consideration is more practical: we have a lot of big ideas, but our business model relies on a steady release schedule. So we have to look at any potential product in a return-on-investment light. As in “is this big idea going to take both of us working non-stop for months?” Because if it does, the company will suffer as a result. In general, Adam tends to work on the bigger, more long-term products, specifically products that generate a lot of intellectual property, while I tend to work on smaller products that utilize subsets of that generated IP. For example, while he was making Sequencer 1, I was working with Eric to design our ad-ab-03 platform, with which we’re able to make multiple small products utilizing existing code (basically all of our current line except for Sequencer 1).

Weidenbaum: What was your own education about using modular synthesizer? How long was there between your using the technology and your making the technology?

Randall: At the end of the day, synthesis, sound design, and production are synthesis, sound design, and production, whether you use a hardware workstation, a stack of vintage synths, a modular synthesizer, a computer, or any combination thereof. I’ve been comfortable with that world for 30 years now, and don’t draw any particular demarcation between the tools. Like most people my age that have been in this business their whole lives, the first patchable synth I had experience with was an ARP 2600. The first large modular synth I owned came much later, a Frac-Rack system from Blacet. I got rid of that a few years ago and switched to Eurorack.

To actually answer your question with hard numbers, I believe my first fondling of a patchable synth was in 1987, and our first modules were released at the end of 2012, so 25 years.

Weidenbaum: When you hear music made by someone else with your modules, does it ever feel — to the musician part of your brain/identity — like you’ve been sampled, like you have some partial authorship of the music?

Randall: It doesn’t feel like I’ve been “sampled,” per se. When you’re a tool-maker, the ultimate joy isn’t in making the tools, but experiencing the creations made with those tools. Yes, I do feel like I had a hand in it, though. The first time it happened, I was watching a movie, and I heard what sounded like one of our plug-ins, plain as day, in the score. I immediately paused the movie, found out who the composer was, and checked our database to discover that yes, he had purchased that very plug-in. (To answer the obvious follow-up, it was Man on Fire, with Harry Gregson-Williams.)

That was a satisfying experience, and I’d say that it was a similar experience to hearing one of my songs on the radio for the first time, or the first time one of my videos played on MTV. (Back when they actually played videos.) But that’s our goal: making things that help people make music. When that lofty event actually occurs, we can’t help but be happy about it.

Read more about Sync 01 at 48hills.org.

Synth City, Part 1 of 2

This is a short interview I did via email with synthesizer player Suzanne Ciani, five-time Grammy nominee, in advance of her planned March 5, 2016, performance in San Francisco as part of the Dial-Tones concert event put on by Moog, the modular synthesizer manufacturer. The interview was for an article I wrote for 48hills.org:

Marc Weidenbaum: How did you come to be involved in the Dial-Tones event?

Suzanne Ciani: I am going to be performing at Moogfest this year in May and someone at Moog asked if I would do a brief performance in San Francisco for Dial-Tones … and since I live so close to the city, and since I am preparing for Moogfest, I thought why not make a brief visit to the city for a good educational cause.

Weidenbaum: I read that it’s been 40 years since you did a solo performance with a Buchla synthesizer. How have you been preparing for the concert?

Ciani: I’m preparing by just spending time with the Buchla system. If you just be with it and interact with it and continue to get to know it, things start to happen. My new system is very very different from the old one, as I am discovering, and it’s been a challenge to let go of ingrained expectations and focus on what is possible now. Also, a limited edition LP of some of my live Buchla concerts from 1975 is just about to be released by Finders Keepers records and I will be including some little snippets of those concerts to honor my roots, so to speak.

Weidenbaum: What unique challenges and opportunities does live quadraphonic performance provide?

Ciani: In the early days, when I was an avid performer on the Buchla, I always insisted on performing in quad … and even turned down a concert once at Lincoln Center because they wouldn’t put up two additional speakers. So, I think, since I am revisitng those old days in some ways, I should uphold the vision of that time. It is very natural to include space as a musical parameter in electronic music, probably the only genre where it makes sense.

Weidenbaum: There has been so much new equipment developed in the modular synthesizer world in recent years. Do you spend a lot of time keeping up, or do you stick with a fairly set amount of equipment for your own music-making?

Ciani: I do use various hardware and software tools in my recordings, but for electronic performing, I am/was a pure Buchla aficionado. I recently went to NAMM and was awed by the number of young modular synth designers. Amazing. This reminds me of the exciting period of early analog synths when instruments were identified with their individual designers as opposed to a generic company: Don [Buchla], Tom [Oberheim], Dave [Smith]. I hope that this time around the inventors stay in control.

Read more about Dial-Tones at 48hills.org.

The One-Key Piano

This one is certainly tailor made for the course I teach about the role of sound in the media landscape, which focuses often throughout its 15-week run on the way things — organizations, people, services — express themselves through sound. There’s a recent Android operating system TV commercial from Google in which pianist Ji-Yong Kim plays a piece of music, the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, on a grand piano, and then alternates between a standard grand piano and a grand piano set up so that each key plays the same note. The “joke” in the ad is a tweak at the perceived uniformity of Apple’s product line. The tagline is “Be together. Not the same.”

One unintended consequence of the advertisement is the rising awareness that there’s an audience out there for such an uber-minimalist music in which rhythm is the closest expression evident to something that approximates melody. The video has had almost one million views since it was posted on February 15. The one-note piano approach, dubbed the Monotune, is now the subject of a 10-track album, available for free from Google Play (play.google.com). Oddly, the Moonlight Sonata doesn’t appear to be on the album, which includes “Three Blind Mice,” “Claire du Lune,” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” All the compositions seem to be, like the Moonlight Sonata, in the public domain.

While the Monotune album is an entertaining peek into the one-note tweak on familiar music, the real pleasure in the TV ad is how it moves back and forth between the extroverted and muted performances. Perhaps a follow-up collection will attempt to capture that quality.

There’s a making-of interview, posted the same day as the Monotune commercial, of how the one-key effect was accomplished. The short version: you can’t tune an entire piano to one note. You have to shorten many of the strings first. There’s a great moment at 1:43 when pianist Kim responds the first time he hears the peculiar responsiveness of the stunted piano:

Found via androidpolice.com.

The Drain as Oscillator

The source of the audio is like a drain, watery sounds heard in fits and starts. The drain just happens to be hooked up to a next-gen synthesizer. This is Danjec’s “OBFP,” in which these occasional drips and drops are transformed into myriad backward-masked wisps and deeply echoing sonic objects. That echo defines the space, and Danjec’s sounds revel in the space’s rewarding reverberation. A few times a string can be heard ever so briefly, as if a guitarist has it in mind to join in the percolating rhythm. And then the string is muted, and the drain proceeds with its efforts.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/danjec. More from Danjec, aka Grant Wilkinson of Brighton, England, at twitter.com/_Muncky, danjec.com, and muncky.bandcamp.com.

Noise/Signal/Noise :: Verse/Chorus/Verse

This droning piece, “160208_Murmur,” slowly lets a semblance of melody and rhythm emerge from a rich fog, and then the fog returns. That structure — noise/signal/noise — may be itself emerging as the verse/chorus/verse of drone music. The four-minute track is nearly halfway through before the slow, metallic, percussive tune kicks in, the early drone persisting beneath it. This noise/signal/noise structure is something to pay attention to, in part for its increasing prominence in drone music, and more particularly for how it inspires you to pay attention. It’s interesting how the mode trains the ear, especially as the signal itself begins to fade. You keep listening to hear some last vestige, perhaps responding to ghost sounds, to what are in fact memories, long after the audio itself has faded.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/undercoverbrother. More from Undercover Brother, of Hamburg, Germany, at undercoversound.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0217: Form Song

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com and at disquiet.com/junto, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:

This project was posted around noon, California time, on Thursday, February 25, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 29, 2016.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0217: Form Song
The Assignment: Take an existing assemblage of rhythm and tone and turn it into verse/chorus/verse.

Step 1: For this project you’ll be working with a pre-existing track of your choosing. First, select one track from the previous Junto project, in which a thin foundational bed was added to beats of pin-prick audio. Visit either of these two URLs:

http://disquiet.com/0216

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/...

Step 2: Confirm the track you selected in Step 1 is available for creative reuse. If you’re not sure, correspond with the musician. If you’re short on time, select a different track.

Step 3: Create a new track by taking the existing track from Step 1 and from it constructing something that follows the verse/chorus/verse format of a traditional song. You can include a bridge, too. No singing is required. You can alter the original audio, beyond just cutting and splicing, and certainly feel free to add a melody, but do maintain some sense of resemblance to the source material.

Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process — identify the source track and include a link to its SoundCloud page.

Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This project was posted around noon, California time, on Thursday, February 25, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 29, 2016.

Length: The length of your track should be the same as that of the source track.

Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this project, and be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please in the title to your track include the term “disquiet0217-formsong.” Also use “disquiet0217-formsong” as a tag for your track.

Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 217th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Take an existing assemblage of rhythm and tone and turn it into verse/chorus/verse”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0217/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

The image associated with this project is from the Flickr account tanakawho, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/4fh7Ly

Arckatron Breaks a Beat

The full release of Subtle Busyness by Arckatron is now out, a cassette and download on the Twin Springs Tapes label. It’s streaming as well, over at twinspringstapes.bandcamp.com. Arcka, aka Shawn Kelly, formerly of Philadelphia and recently relocated to Los Angeles, traffics in abstract instrumental hip-hop. He’s long been a proponent of utilizing under-appreciated snippets of familiar music, often R&B, and on Subtle Busyness he’s expanded into off-kilter rhythmic excursions. The album was featured here twice in advance of its release, back in January when it was announced and in mid-February when additional tracks were uploaded for promotional purposes. On the occasion of its full arrival, all 21 tracks, do check out the glorious broken beat that is “Naverparse”:

Subtle Busyness by ARCKATRON

More from Arcka at arckatron.us. More from the Twin Springs label at twinspringstapes.bandcamp.com and facebook.com/twinspringstapes. And here’s an interview I did with Arcka/Kelly back in 2009: “Young Communicator.”

Music for and from Haikus

“After the dancing / The wind in the pine trees / The voices of insects.” That brief poem was the subject of the 111th Naviar Haiku project. Naviar Haiku is a weekly project series, like the Disquiet Junto and the Stonesthrow Beat Battles, in which musicians respond to prompts. In the case of Naviar, each prompt is a haiku that the participating musicians then transform into sound. The musicians produce, in essence, a score to the words — not necessarily, if ever, to the melody inherent in the words, but to the images and narrative that the words express. I wrote the haiku for the 40th Naviar project (“There’s a lifetime in / between the first and second / clicks of the door’s lock”), which doubled as a Junto project (the 145th). Yesterday I wrote about another weekly project, Weekly Beats, through the lens of a recent piece that employed field recordings. Like the Weekly Beats, the Naviar puts a minimal constraint on the participants. In the hands of the musician who goes by noimspartacus (based in Birmingham, England), it’s a call for a whimsical, modest fantasia. Wind chimes give way to an underlying drone, out of which emerges a playful melody played on synthesized instruments. At first it’s a little organ or horn sound, but then a more high-pitched tone is introduced, drawing on the listener’s memory of that chime at the opening.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/noimspartacus. More from noimspartacus at noimspartacus.wordpress.com. More from the Naviar Haiku at naviarlab.tumblr.com.